Guest Blog: NOIR CITY, CONFESSIONS OF A HIT MAN AND MORE by Richard Godwin.

Publishing really is in a state of flux, with the rise and rise of Amazon and it still seems many publishers do not know what they are doing and behave with a lack of the kind of professionalism and regard for Artists that you would expect given the fact that without the author without the novelist there would be no publisher, a fact that seems all to easily to have been forgotten.

I have had four novels already published this year, Savage Highway, The Pure And The Hated, Ersatz World, and Disembodied. This September sees the translation of my novel Apostle Rising into Slovenian, now that seems postponed, and the coming months are going to be busy. One interesting event, or two rather, have been the demise and behaviour of two Italian publishers, Lite Editions an imprint of Atlantis, and MeMe. I received notification from Lite that they are shutting down, no explanation, and then I had to email them repeatedly to get the right letter and payment from them. As a result I have the full rights back to my erotica Noir Novel, Noir City, which I have extensively re-written and which is available here and here.

This is a synopsis:

Dangerous, blonde Gigolo, Paris Tongue, uses his looks to seduce beautiful and wealthy women and introduce them to the Secret Hour, that hidden time when they can escape their lives. Using his inheritance to travel, he penetrates the erotic essence of different cities, from London, to Paris, Rome, Madrid and Dusseldorf. But his sexual escapades begin to catch up with him. When he sleeps with the wife of a Mafia Boss he is hunted across Europe by hit men. He manages to evade his assassins, until they find him in Spain. But by then he has understood the deeper philosophy of Eros at the villa owned by the illegitimate granddaughter of Georges Bataille, and he sees them off. He is, after all, the bastard child of a killer, who knows how to survive. In Germany he meets Anja from Croatia, the first woman he wants to settle down with.

MeMe contacted me to say they are selling the company and I waited for six months to receive further news, none came. So I got my rights back to Confessions Of A Hit Man..

Once again a synopsis:

Confessions of a Hit Man is a high octane thriller with a plot that adds velocity like a well-oiled chicane. When ex-Royal Marine Jack becomes a paid assassin, work comes easily, especially when working for the Sicilian Mafia, until he gets drawn into a government plot selling enriched plutonium to a rogue Nation.

My new novel Buffalo And Sour Mash is now out fromDown & Out Books, and you can buy it here and here. It is a crime novel about distorted love. A Western. A lyrical slice of the prairie, a frontier narrative. A noir novel about obsession and revenge, desire and predation. A look at one man’s grip on insanity and a story about female beauty and showmanship.

‘It was those wild eyes that did it to them every time. Every look as intense as a cobra stare, as if he was looking through the spider webbed surface of a broken window.’

I am on the BBC talking about it soon. My novel Locked In Cages is to be published this December.

Here are a few words on it: The therapist was paid to take their nightmares away, their abductor is putting them back in.

That’s nine, not bad for a year, and next year looks like it will be eight, including the long -awaited release of the sequel to Apostle Rising.